Godstone Brewers’ pop-up pub nights at Flower Farm Shop

PUBLISHED: 10:49 09 March 2017 | UPDATED: 12:06 29 March 2017

Photos: Matthew Williams

Godstone Brewers’ pop-up pub with a twist at Flower Farm Shop

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Normally a place for adventurous tea drinkers and those looking to cut down the food miles of their grocery shopping, Flower Farm Shop in Godstone has been leading a double life in recent weeks. Matthew Williams visits for Godstone Brewers’ Fresh Fridays - a pop-up pub with a twist

A quirky blink and you’ll miss it foodie destination just outside the village of Godstone, the last frontier-like Flower Farm Shop has been trying its hand as a pop-up pub in recent weeks – and a very good job it appears to be doing too.

To welcome the weekend, the knowledgeable folk at Godstone Brewers have been taking over the tea drinker’s dream of a café (I lost count of the number of loose-leaf teas on offer) for beer talk and a few pints of their latest creations - just last week, one of the brews was so new that it had yet to be named!

The microbrewery is the brain child of Steve Taylor and Anne Jackson, who both studied the craft at university before being “distracted by other careers” in the large “blue chip” food world.

Having continued to home brew over the years (Anne even reached the 2014 final of The One Show Brew Off competition), they launched Godstone Brewers on the unsuspecting public in 2015 and already have a well-rounded range of beers.

Many of these are named after local legends, including Trenchman’s Hop (a pirate turned smuggler who bled to death in a village pub in 1687); Polly Paine’s Porter (a mediaeval witch who happened to call Godstone home); and Bitter Entropy (loosely based on the area’s real-world predilection for producing and supplying the British Empire with gunpowder once upon a time).

With six main beers, they’re aiming to keep things “manageable” but they always have a few seasonal offerings and it certainly sounds like there are plenty of experiments ongoing behind the scenes.

The Fresh Fridays events, which run from 5pm to 8pm, are a perfectly laid-back way to gear yourself up for the weekend in an old fashioned pub environment with a twist. Casks on the bar, no fake atmosphere, free sausage rolls making occasional rounds of the place…

There were queues out the door on Surrey Life’s visit, and it’s hard to imagine they’ll call time at the bar anytime soon despite initially only launching as a temporary concern.

If you love your beer and good company in a relaxed and slightly quirky environment, then these events could very well be the place for you.